Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Who Was the "Real" Mata Hari?

"If the majority of these portrayals are crazily inaccurate, there is a certain justice in the extent to which Mata Hari’s life story has been twisted and embellished, because she did some of that twisting and embellishing herself."

“She was a creation from beginning to end, a character in a play that she continuously rescripted,” says Pat Shipman in her biography of Mata Hari, Femme Fatale. Her compulsion to spin tall tales about her background helped to make her an icon: a unique embodiment of sex, glamour, intrigue and danger. But it also led to her death in October 1917, at the age of 41."